Proverbs 24:17 tells us:  "Do not rejoice when your enemy falls." As a soldier, I can hardly rejoice on the horrifying images of scores of uniformed policemen, lying dead and badly wounded in the Gaza police compound, which were aired by Al-Jazeera live from the scene.

Details of this attack have not been officially released, but it's almost certain that this particular target was part of the Israel Defense Forces "target bank" prepared long in advance, based on highly accurate intelligence and pre-programmed on fighter mission computers before the strike.

Whether this particular target was under real-time surveillance from UAV or satellite is not known. Normally the presence of a mass parade would have been a consideration in holding back on an attack. There exists of course the possibility that the Israeli leadership wished to send a "shock and awe" message to Hamas right at the opening of the attack - to set new rules to the game that has been so ruthlessly played for years by Hamas and other Islamic fundamentalists.

If the latter was part of the warfighting directive by political decision-makers, they must have achieved their goal, because the  Hamas leadership has apparently gone into deep underground hiding, leaving their soldiers to fight for their lives.

The Israeli blitz has already destroyed a large part of Hamas' painfully assembled arsenal. Over a hundred secret weapons caches and carefully camouflaged subterranean rocket launching sites have been identified by intelligence and eliminated, using sophisticated hyper-spectral sensor and electro-optic detection systems.

Hamas subterranean rocket launch site destroyed

Although Israel's intelligence community estimates that Hamas must have hundreds of Qassam and Grad rockets still stacked away, its launching capability seems to have been severely degraded.

In an attempt to signal that it still had fight left, Hamas on Sunday made the first use of the 122mm, 42km-range Grad rocket (recently smuggled in from Iran) to fire into an area near Israel's major seaport of Ashdod.

With two reserve brigades having been called up already to bolster the substantial land forces deployed in jump-off positions near the border, the IDF is awaiting orders to enter, should a ground strike become necessary.

Hamas military post in downtown Gaza before destruction

But meanwhile the air force appears to be conducting a textbook campaign. It seems that the air strikes are highly accurate and hit percentage is exceptionally high, with surprisingly minor collateral damage. This is based on painstaking intelligence gathering work over many months. As Al Jazeera is present on the spot, there is no doubt that, should there be civilian casualties, or worse, dead children to portray, these would have been on every TV screen by now.

The air force's latest strike was particularily effective. Sunday afternoon, no less than forty subterranean tunnels were destroyed in a few minutes, by JDAM guided bombs, along the so-called Philadelphi route on the Rafah-Egyptian border.

Shrewdly exploiting the carnage created, Hamas bulldozers toppled the Egyptian border fence and masses of Gazaeans streamed into Sinai, ignoring the Egyptian armored cars desperately trying to ward them off.

It now remains to be seen whether Hamas will recover from the shock and respond with a mass bombardment on Israeli territory, trying to cause as many casualties as possible, which would inevitably result in a land incursion into the Gaza Strip proper. Then the real war will start. One should hope that both sides will come to their senses and find ways back to a new more effective tahdiya  (ceasefire) in order to avert further bloodshed.